I'm Sorry You Feel That Way (19 page)

Al tells me I need to chill out. Because what if there’s another possibility? What if when you die, that’s it, that’s the end, there is no God, no heaven, no eternal damnation, no fiery pit, no Miss McCade? What if there’s just nothingness. Al says that’s what he believes, so why not be a nice person but still have a good time.

When I was in college, I read
Pensées
, a work by a seventeenth-century French philosopher, Blaise Pascal, who encouraged me to put my money on God. Might as well, Pascal said. If you believe, and He exists, the payoff is huge. But if you don’t believe, and God is real, you’re screwed. If you believe, and it turns out there is no God, then really, what have you lost? Pascal believed people were lousy anyway—“How hollow is the heart of man,” he wrote in
Pensées
, “and how full of excrement!”—so why not live a virtuous life? Why not believe, and live like you believe, and maybe, just maybe, you’ll end up behaving your way to belief?

Pascal sounds a lot like Dr. Phil, who says you can behave your way to success, and Pascal also reminds me a lot of my father, who said I do as I’m told because if I didn’t there’d be hell to pay.

Something in me resisted my father; it’s the same something that thinks it’s Dr. Phil who is full of excrement. Maybe it’s the desire to live a fiery and interesting life, a longing for adventure. Maybe it’s that I have an appreciation for fornication, intoxication, and AC/DC. Maybe it’s that I think Saturday night is more fun than Sunday morning, and if Eve didn’t pick that apple, there’d be no apple pie.

Al says he’s going to turn his beliefs into his own religion, his own church; he can make good use out of the nonprofit tax status. He says he’ll be the spiritual leader of this new faith—no, actually, he will be God—and it will be my job to secure the compound, bring him virgins, and hang out at airports selling roses. He says he’s putting my friend the Satanist in charge of making sure there are enough clean flowing white robes for everyone. He says his new religion is going to combine the pacifist teachings of Buddha with the doll-making practices of voodoo. “I’m going to call it Boo-Doo,” Al says. “At the beginning of services, my members will chant ‘Who do Boo-Doo? We do and you do!’ five times. Then we’ll drink some beer, play some poker, and have some laughs. Then church is over. Until next time.”

I laugh, but secretly, part of me is nervous. Part of me is pretty certain that God in heaven—and certainly Miss McCade—is annoyed at Al but that they’re saving their real wrath for me. Because I laugh at blasphemy instead of setting the blasphemer straight. Because I haven’t brought the Satanist to the Lord. Because I was raised in the Christian and Missionary Alliance church, and that means I’ve been told, I should know, I’ve been given the truth and made aware of the consequences, so what part of eternal damnation do I not understand? Miss McCade pats me on the hand, saying,
Girl, it’s going to be hot where you’re going.

Y
esterday my son was turning the pages in his eighth-grade yearbook so we could play a game I came up with called Guess Which Kids Are Retarded. The boy thought the game was terrible, so cruel and so mean that I should have to pay a fine, I should have to pay him ten bucks every time I was wrong.

But I refused to pay him anything. I was horrible at guessing who was and who wasn’t retarded. I’ve never been good at knowing something about a person just by looking at him. The ones I thought were special needs for sure turned out to be some of the coolest kids in the class, and the ones who actually were mentally retarded looked to me like members of the chess club. The problem, I decided, is that most human beings between the ages of twelve and fifteen look like their needs are special. Their necks are too skinny to hold up their heads. Their teeth are shiny and enormous. There is a shifty, furtive look in their eyes, and their tongues frequently stick out at odd angles.

All the girls who I thought were sort of cute my son said yuck about. The girl he pointed out as hot did not looked retarded. She looked pleased to be in front of a camera. She looked like typical cheerleader material, all blond and blue-eyed, skinny and pretty and prissy. Then he pointed to a different girl. He informed me that this girl is a slut.

“A slut?” I said. “She’s thirteen years old! How can she be a slut? You don’t even know what a slut is. What does that word mean to you, ‘slut’? I mean, how are you defining your term? You can’t just call a girl a slut and not explain what you mean by it.”

The boy rolled his eyes. “What I mean,” he said with exaggerated patience, “is she’s been with too many guys.”

“Too many guys!” I said. “Too many guys!”

The boy wanted to know why was I so worked up.

When I asked him how many guys are too many guys, he said it wasn’t something that could be pinned down to a specific number. When I asked him what do you mean by “been with,” what do you think “been with” implies, he said it could mean a lot of things, none of which he cared to discuss with his mother. When I asked him, well, then, how could you possibly know this girl is a slut, what evidence do you have, he said he didn’t have any evidence. He said he didn’t need any. He just knew.

“Right,” I said. “It’s one of those things a person just knows. Yes. Right. Of course. It’s instinctual.”

Because the boy spent most of his free time burrowed up in his room, playing endless hours of Halo, slack-jawed and mouth-breathing, pale and getting paler, hopped up on Red Bull and Oreos, pepperoni pizza and Doritos, his eyes glazed over, his breath bad, his legs atrophied from lack of use, I figured he didn’t have any biblical knowledge of this girl’s sluttiness. It just wasn’t possible. One would have to leave his room for that to happen. One would need to take a shower every now and then. One would have to put down his joystick.

“It’s not a joystick!” he shouted. “I keep telling you that! It’s a controller, okay?”

I studied the slut’s yearbook picture. Long dark hair. Brown eyes. Her neck was scrawny. She was smiling and her teeth looked really big. She looked like everyone else. Unless there was someone in the know available to point it out, you’d never guess this girl was a slut. She looked like a regular thirteen-year-old girl.

Maybe it was in how she dressed. I asked the boy if this girl dressed like a slut.

“When I was her age,” I told him, “I had a belt buckle that said
Boy Toy.
As soon as I walked out of the house, I went in the alley and rolled up the waistband on my skirt. I once wore my father’s blue cardigan sweater to school. As a
dress.
” I paused, raising my eyebrows so he’d understand I meant business. “It was all I wore.”

The boy said what he didn’t understand was why I was making such a big deal about this. “I mean, what is your problem?” he said.

“That’s for me to know and you to find out,” I told him. I asked my son is this girl the slut of the whole class, the slut of the whole eighth grade.

He said she was.

“Well, then,” I said, “you need to know there are worse things a girl can be. She could be a person who tortures small animals, for example, or she could be someone who eats paste. She could be the girl who wears white shoes after Labor Day. White shoes after Labor Day!” I said. “That’s a crime about a thousand times worse than being an eighth-grade slut.”

I could tell the boy wanted to argue that nobody eats paste in eighth grade, not even the retarded kids, and lots of people wear white shoes year-round. He’d go on about white Reeboks, white Nikes, white Adidas—he was so predictable! But I’d already closed the yearbook. I told him Guess Which Kids Are Retarded was a terrible game, a mean game, and that I didn’t want to ever hear him refer to a girl as a slut again, that girl or any other. As far as I was concerned, the matter was resolved.

“Fine,” he said. “She’s not a slut.”

“I’m pleased to hear you say that.”

The boy paused.

“She’s a skanky ho bag.”

In that moment, and for the rest of the day, I hated boys, just hated them.

 

 

 

 

 

I haven’t always hated boys. There have been times when I liked them quite a bit.

I was the girl who liked boys so much that she kissed them on the first date. Sometimes I did even more. I once watched a shirtless boy, his body lean and tan, his stomach flat and muscled, his T-shirt hanging out of the back pocket of his jeans, show off for me. He did crunches while hanging upside down from the monkey bars at Lincoln Park—
ninety-six, ninety-seven, ninety-eight
—and when he got to one hundred, I applauded. Then I took off my shirt.

I was a girl who’d take off her shirt herself, reaching one-handed behind her back to spring open her bra. I left my footprint on the passenger’s side window of a car. The guy and I got busted that night, twice, by the same cop, a bulky, jug-eared man named Officer McCormick who suggested the first time that we get on down the road. The second time he rubbed his eyes, said he had a headache, told us he had three young daughters at home who he hated to think might someday be pawed at in a car. He looked at me, sadly, it seemed, and said, “Miss, why don’t you ask your gentleman friend to take you on home. It would be the honorable thing for him to do.”

But the minute Officer McCormick turned his back, my gentleman friend called me Scarlett O’Hara and I called him Rhett Butler, and we giggled and talked dirty about my honor in southern accents until one of us—okay, it was me—suggested the lake is a good place to park.

 

 

 

 

 

So I did slutty things. Maybe I was even sort of a slut. I probably was a slut. There were boys and other girls who thought so, said so, told each other so.

My son doesn’t know this about me. He would probably be humiliated, demoralized, shocked. He’d probably consider it a form of child abuse if I ever revealed that I once had car sex with this guy on the first date, and then afterward, I opened the door and puked up a very expensive bottle of red wine. “The guy was your father, dude!” I could tell him. “What do you think of them apples?” I could say, and “Who are you calling a slut now?”

My son would be mortified, scandalized, pained to learn his mother was a girl who carried condoms in her purse or in her pocket. I kept a box of condoms in the nightstand next to my bed.

The boy doesn’t know that, but he does know about condoms. When he was five years old, he walked up to me in Rite Aid carrying a big handful, about twenty condoms individually wrapped in shiny gold foil. They kept falling out of his hands. He wanted to know what are these and what are they for.

I know he wanted them to be candy, like those chocolate coins he’d get in his Christmas stocking. “Those are condoms,” I told him. “A man wears one when he doesn’t want to make a baby.”

“Oh, condoms,” the boy said, like it was a word he’d known but forgotten, like oh, of course, condoms.

“Hmmmmmp,” the boy said, as in I’ll-be-darned and How-about-that. “Do I need one?” he wanted to know.

I told him he’d always need one. I told him sex is fun, especially when you’re young and strong and healthy, and you like living in your body, but you always, always wear a condom.

“Should I put one on right now?” he said.

After I got the boy home from Rite Aid, I gave him the big talk. I thought I did a pretty good job. I wasn’t squeamish or shy or embarrassed as I told him everything I could think of concerning sex. I was frank and up-front and honest, and I did not use ridiculous words like “winky-dinky” or “willy” or “pecker” or “coochie.” I called the parts of the body by their proper names, I said “penis” and “vagina,” “testicles” and “secondary sex organs,” I explained what various acts are and how they are performed, I talked about how some boys like girls and some boys like boys, and that’s okay. “Do you think you like boys or girls?” I asked him.

“Girls stink,” he said, “but I’ll marry one anyway.”

I showed the boy my copy of
Our Bodies, Ourselves
, I translated slang, I told him about masturbation. I wanted to cover everything.

“Hmmmmmmp,” the boy would occasionally say, as in That’s-really-something, as in Imagine-that and Whodda-thunk-it?

Finally, I asked him if he had any questions.

“Can I go to the bathroom?” he said.

“Hurry!” I said. “Come right back! There’s still more!”

But when half an hour passed, and he didn’t come back, I went looking for him. I found him cross-legged on the floor in his bedroom, playing with Legos. He was listening to his Barney CD, something he hadn’t done since he turned five and declared he’d had enough, he was never watching children’s programming on public television ever again.

I asked him did he have any questions about what we’d just been talking about? Did he have any questions about sex?

He said yes.

“Ask me anything!” I said brightly. “Anything!”

He said, “What would have happened if you were a person, and Dad was an eagle, and you guys had sex, and there was an egg, a gigantic egg, and when it hatched, a baby came out, and the baby was me. Would I have a beak? Would I have talons? Would I be able to fly? It would be cool if I was half a human and half a predator bird.”

“Wait right here,” I told him, and I pulled my copy of
Bulfinch’s Mythology
off the shelf and opened it to Leda and the Swan. While he played with Legos, I told him the story of Zeus in the form of a long-necked bird raping the beautiful Leda. I fully intended to use this as a launching point for talking about sex that’s consensual and sex that’s not consensual, but something in the boy’s face stopped me. I think he was imagining himself emerging from a cracked egg, complete with wings, talons, a beak. I think he was imagining himself flying high above the earth, swooping down to spear a fish or a rabbit, then swooping back up to the tallest tree.